University Park, Los Angeles

Why you should experience University Park in Los Angeles, California.

University Park is a scholarly enclave where South Los Angeles's nineteenth-century suburban expansion meets one of the city's oldest concentrations of residential architecture, early streetcar growth and an academic presence dating to the frontier-era city.

Positioned between West Adams, Exposition Park, and Adams-Normandie, the neighborhood occupies level terrain immediately southwest of Downtown, where a rectilinear street grid extends across former agricultural ground and divides residential blocks from the large institutional footprint along its southern edge. Queen Anne cottages, Craftsman houses, American Foursquare residences, Spanish Colonial Revival buildings and substantial late nineteenth-century mansions create pronounced shifts in scale across streets whose architecture spans several major phases of Los Angeles domestic design. Adams Boulevard supplies the primary encounter through broad blocks where mature landscaping and large residences retain the proportions of the affluent suburban corridor that emerged beyond the nineteenth-century city center. Hoover Street creates a secondary passage along denser residential terrain, where smaller parcels and multifamily buildings compress the scale before the street reaches the academic district farther south. The result is a neighborhood whose unusually complete architectural chronology captures Los Angeles during the transition from agricultural outskirts to streetcar suburb and metropolitan center.

What you should know about University Park.

University Park is best known for developing around the University of Southern California as Los Angeles expanded southward during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Much of the district remained orchards, barley fields and vegetable farms when Vincent A. Hoover created the Hoover Tract in 1875, the first residential subdivision within the later neighborhood. Serious suburban settlement remained limited until the real-estate expansion of the following decade, when the arrival of Santa Fe service intensified speculation across Southern California. Isaias W. Hellman, former California governor John G. Downey and horticulturist Ozro W. Childs controlled substantial acreage near the southwestern edge of the city and supplied 308 lots for the creation and financial support of a university. Judge Robert Maclay Widney organized the institution's trustees, and more than 1,000 Angelenos gathered for the cornerstone ceremony of its first building on September 4, 1880. USC opened the following month with 53 students and 10 teachers in a city that still lacked paved streets and electric lights. The surrounding settlement took the University Park name in 1883, replacing the earlier West Los Angeles designation as houses and commercial activity gathered around the new institution. Streetcar service from Downtown reached the area in 1891, strengthening residential growth as affluent Angelenos moved south from Bunker Hill onto larger suburban parcels. Houses erected between 1885 and the 1920s left University Park with Queen Anne, Craftsman, American Colonial Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival architecture across a district containing one of Los Angeles's densest concentrations of designated historic properties.

Judge Charles Silent developed Chester Place during the closing 1890s and opening 1900s as an exclusive residential park whose oversized lots attracted some of early Los Angeles's wealthiest households. Architect Sumner Hunt contributed work to the enclave, and its turn-of-the-century residences joined neighboring St. James Park in concentrating domestic architecture associated with the city's rising industrial, financial and professional class. Oil producer Edward L. Doheny and his wife Carrie Estelle Doheny occupied the Chester Place mansion that became the center of an estate extending across the private street for almost six decades. Countess Doheny's death in 1958 transferred the property to the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, opening another institutional chapter for houses originally constructed as private expressions of Gilded Age wealth. Mount Saint Mary's established its second campus there in 1962, using the former estate for associate, graduate and professional education. A new classroom and auditorium building followed in 1965 as the university adapted the historic residential enclave to academic purposes. Mount Saint Mary's subsequently secured the remaining Doheny property on both sides of Chester Place, joining preserved early twentieth-century houses with a college founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. The conversion carried one of University Park's most exclusive residential precincts from private wealth into higher education without severing the architectural continuity that had distinguished the street since its creation.

How to fold University Park into your trip.

University Park works as the anchor for an outing connecting Los Angeles's original encyclopedic museum, a state institution created through Black civic advocacy and a science center whose aerospace holdings extend the intellectual character of Exposition Park.

Begin at Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, whose ground had formed part of Agricultural Park before civic reformer William Miller Bowen led the campaign to remake the area as a cultural center. Frank Hudson and William A. D. Munsell designed the original building with Spanish Renaissance ornament, Romanesque arches and a Beaux-Arts plan centered on a 75-foot rotunda; Julia Bracken Wendt's sculptural group occupies its center beneath Walter Horace Judson's stained-glass skylight. The institution opened on November 6, 1913 as the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art, the same year it gained exclusive rights to remove prehistoric remains from Rancho La Brea. Its art division departed for the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1963, leaving the Exposition Park institution to continue as the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Continue to California African American Museum, founded in 1977 after a sustained campaign by community advocates seeking a state institution devoted to African American art, history and culture. Formal operations began in 1981 under first director Aurelia Brooks, and Richmond Barthé's bronze bust of civil-rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune became the first acquisition for the permanent collection. CAAM entered its 44,000-square-foot Exposition Park home in 1984, designed by African American architects Jack Haywood and Vince Proby, with The Black Olympians 1904-1984 opening during the Los Angeles Olympic Games under curator Lonnie Bunch. Its collection has since grown to 5,000 objects spanning art and historical artifacts with particular emphasis on California, the American West and the wider African diaspora. Conclude at California Science Center, where Space Shuttle Endeavour arrived in 2012 after completing 25 space missions and traveling 123 million miles beyond Earth. NASA flew the orbiter to Los Angeles aboard a Shuttle Carrier Aircraft before the final phase, Mission 26, carried the spacecraft across 12 miles of Inglewood and Los Angeles streets to Exposition Park. The operation placed a vehicle built for orbital flight within the same cultural precinct that had begun its institutional transformation more than a century earlier. The progression moves from an encyclopedic institution created during Exposition Park's early civic transformation through a museum born from Black cultural advocacy and culminates with a spacecraft whose arrival carried aerospace history directly through the streets of Los Angeles.

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